


How to Completely Cease to Exist Without Being Missed

by Draikinator



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Catharticism, Grief shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-29 00:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3875923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draikinator/pseuds/Draikinator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Completely Cease to Exist Without Being Missed

**Stage 1: Disbelief**

Raf stares at the screen.

Agent Fowler relieved of duty. No explanation why. New head of interplanetary relations refuses to involve children in Cybertronian/Earth exchanges. Witness Protection. New name. Not to have any more contact with any alien life or else.

He closes his laptop and opens his phone, typing a message to Bee. Something is wrong. Something has happened. Where are you. Please talk to them. Please help.

Two weeks, no response.

He keeps sending messages. Please respond. Please respond. Please respond.

**Stage 2: Denial**

He’s never been in as much trouble as he is right now, or so they tell him. Sure, he’s accused of treason and a dozen other things, but he’s thirteen and he thinks everyone in the room knows this isn’t going to work. He can’t understand why they keep saying he’s never been in so deep, because it seems to him this is nothing compared to screaming against glass on a foreign planet, surrounded by fire. Seems like nothing next to the cold glittering stars of Colorado, racing toward a home that was gone alone and afraid and hungry, unsure if his family was alive, unsure if he was going to be alive five minutes later.

He doesn’t think any of them understand anything.

He doesn’t think they’re telling the truth. He snuck out in the dead of night for a reason and he knows he hacked their systems properly, it’s not like he wasn’t intimately acquainted with them as it was. He doesn’t think the files he found could be right. Optimus couldn’t be dead. Cybertron couldn’t be fine. Bee hadn’t called in months, hadn’t read his messages, hadn’t responded. Bee couldn’t be fine. They were family.

If Bee were fine, he would know. Bee would have never abandoned him. Never.

**Stage 3: Anger**

Bee HAD abandoned him. He was getting ready to leave the cafe he was holed up in the corner of when he realized it, wrapped in a jacket he hadn’t washed in weeks and eyes glued to his screen and the many, many servers he had ripped open back doors too, searching, searching, searching, and he was ready to leave because he’d told the barista he was waiting for his mom two hours ago and she was starting to give him suspicious looks- and there it was.

An agreement, that Cybertronians would no longer interfere in human affairs. No more fighting on earth. No more sharing technology. No more anything. No more contact. Signed by everyone- signed by Bee. Signed by Bee. Signed by Bee.

We’re just a space bridge away. Just a space bridge away. Just a spacebridge away.

He shoves his laptop in his bag and steals a bag of chips from under the counter when she isn’t looking, dipping back out into the street. He had places to go and people to meet, but he doesn’t know where he’s going now. He doesn’t need to save Bee. Cybertron doesn’t need him. Bee doesn’t need him. Bee doesn’t want him.

He grits his teeth and shoves his white knuckled fists into his coat pockets, fingers wrapping around quarters and disposable phones. Bee doesn’t want him. Bee doesn’t want him.

Too bad.

**Stage 4: Bargaining**

He could almost laugh. This entire situation was utterly ridiculous.

The spacebridge was glowing, brilliant and green and beautiful, a testament to all the things he intended to take back. He refused to be treated like a child purely because he was a child.

Soundwave steps out of the bridge, far worse for the wear, and stares at him. He doesn’t move when the portal closes, or when Raf clambers down from the Harbringer’s massive keypad and onto the floor.

“I need your help,” he says. “I need to get back to my family. I need to go home. You can come too. Do you want to go home?”

Soundwave nods.

They are going home.

**Stage 5: Guilt**

Soundwave hands him a tiny part he’s completed- it looks like a hip rotor. He takes it with both hands and sets it into the joint, tweaking the bandings and axels. The left back leg is coming along nicely, but the right isn’t quite symmetrical yet, and he isn’t sure how much detail he WANTS to put into the front legs.

On the one hand, he’s glad he decided to build it on four legs instead of two- it basically solved all of the balance issues right off the bat. The oxygen converter was honestly the easiest prt- it blosted the chest of the armour out it a bulky way, but with Soundwave’s help he was fairly certain his natural lifespan would run out before its did.

Before anyone on Cybertron’s did. Except for Optimus.

He wonders if things would have been different if he’d been there to help as he screws in the spinal joints individually, because if he hadn’t been there to throw Soundwave into the Shadowzone when they killed Megatron, things would have been different.

He should have been there. He can’t fail to be there again. He can’t.

**Stage 6: Depression**

It’s easy to wear it- easier than he expected. The firs text had some major balance issues, but it was only when he realize how much the suit looked like a cat that the idea for a tail occurred to him- it balanced flawlessly, like a true predator, and it moved nearly silently. He was proud of it- perhaps a bot more than was really appropriate, but he couldn’t really help himself. He’d built a space suit. he’d built his own damn Apex Armor, and he’d built it better.

On launch day he wasn’t even sure he gave a shit if Bee was on that stupid planet at all. Bee had left him. He’d lft him and never come back. There was nothing on Cybertron worth leaving for.

But he’d worked so hard and there was nothing on earth worth staying for. A family he’d run from, a government he’d been rejected by, friends who hadn’t found him.

Space was so huge, and his tiny fragile human lifespan did not give him very long to scour it, but he would.

He left Raf on earth, a frightened human child who sobbed when people screamed and begged not to be left alone. He left larger, and stronger, and smarter, and harder and colder. He left with a dark enemy he’d once tried to kill and he left his friend.

**Stage 7: Acceptance**

He leaves as Ravage, as much a Cybertonian as the rest of them, no matter what they believed or said. Space is huge. Home is out there.

Somewhere.

Somewhere.


End file.
